Coming to Egypt? Why not take the Solar CITIES Tour!?

The Solar CITIES Solar Egypt Tour:

Now you can plan your trip to Cairo's Solar CITIES sites in Google Earth!

Coordinate your trip with your friends in UNYPE!

Navigate the streets of Medieval Historic Cairo and the Informal Communities without getting lost!

See the Renaissance of Solar Energy in Inner City Cairo!

Meet the people who are making it happen in the Zabaleen recycling community and Darb El Ahmar!

Ideal for Students in Urban Planning/Environmental Science/Ecology/Renewable Energy/Engineering/Health and Medicine/Arabic Studies/Younameit




To download the tour click here (latest .kmz update March 12, 2008)

Thinking of visiting Egypt, but worried about offsetting all the carbon from the long flight? Want to see the pyramids but afraid that the best things happening in Heliopolis (the Pharoanic "city of the sun") happened thousands of years ago?

Think again.

Great things are happening in Cairo, but in the most unlikely of places, off the beaten path, in places that tourists rarely get to go!

If you are interested in seeing how the urban poor, who produce the least CO2 per capita, are dealing with climate change and ensuring that as development proceeds, they can leap-frog into a cleaner, greener 21st century, then this is the Cairo tour for you!

On the Solar CITIES urban eco-tour, led in English and/or Arabic by local Solar Cities coordinators Hana Fathy, Mahmoud Dardir, Mustafa Hussein and friends, you get to meet with real people, visit real homes, have roof top tea by the shade of home-built solar panels, and learn how renewable energy is impacting the lives of "the other 90%".

Your tour of the do-it-themselves solar installations in Muqattam and Darb El Ahmar takes you through charming medieval streets still plied by camels, horses, donkey-carts and sheep.

It takes you to the imposing Saint Sam'aan monastery, carved out of a massive mountain of rock overlooking the Zabaleen garbage recycling community, where a miracle occurred a millenium ago to bring Christians, Muslims and Jews together in harmony and where, today, another miracle in peace-making through confronting our mutual environmental challenges is underway!

Then it takes you into the narrow winding streets beneath Muqattam Hills where mountains of Cairo's waste is carefully sorted and separated and turned into food for the animals and raw materials for a home-grown industrial ecology industry led by a culture of recycling experts.

The tour includes a lunch-time visit to the world-class lakeside cafe in Al Azhar Park -- once a garbage dump now turned by the Aga Khan Foundation into one of the most beautiful parks and botanical gardens in the world.

And your tour takes you out to the rural community of Abu Nimrus in Giza, to see first hand how urban sprawl is consuming what little is left of Egypt's fertile agricultural area, and to celebrate with the leaders of the Abu Nimrus Environmental Science Center the initiatives that could help avert the food crises that portends.

Finally, you end up at the famous Giza pyramids for the evening sound and light show made famous in the James Bond film "The Spy Who Loved Me", where the ancient history of "the city of the sun" is narrated to a spectacular blend of multimedia and music.

Want to save the world?

Join us on the Solar CITIES Eco-tour.

You'll never look at development the same again.





FAQ:

What does it cost?

We can accomodate tours for every budget category.

Soon we will be posting do-it-yourself foot-tours with metro and bus maps and self-guided foot paths. These tours are free and for hardy travelers used to going-it-alone. A minimal knowledge of Arabic is recommended as very few people in these communities, which have no official tourism industry, speak other languages. All we ask is that if you do buy things you spend locally by purchasing food and drinks and souvenirs from local vendors to help the communities' economies, and if you visit a home and the family spend time with you, consider making a donation for their time. The Historic Part of Cairo has the same handicraft merchandise as the famous Khan El Khalili, but is cheaper and better quality. The Association for the Protection of the Environment factory sells beautiful recycled paper and cloth products (stationary, rugs, wall hangings) that can also be purchased in hotels, but by purchasing from the makers themselves, you cut out the middlemen and put much needed funds into the pockets of the people who need it most!

If you visit the famous Zabaleen Informal Recycling School, run by legendary educational reformer Dr. Laila Iskander and her teaching staff, we encourage small donations to help keep the school running.

If you would like a guided tour by our friendly and knowledgeable local experts, Hana and Mahmoud and Mustafa and their team are happy to make appointments to act as official tour guides, charging a "plumbers' normal day rate" of 60 LE (about 10 bucks) for each group of 1 to 4 people, to offset foregone income (they would otherwise spend the day doing environmental development work and building and plumbing solar hot water systems). For groups larger than 4 people we ask for an additional 10 LE (about 2 bucks) per person.

Car, day taxi, or minivan rental can be arranged by your, your hotel, or by Solar CITIES coordinators. A day taxi can usually be hired for about 60 LE for the duration of the tour.

Lunch, if provided by one of the families on the tour (generally chicken, tuna, home-made bread, local goats or sheeps cheese and tomatoes with soft drinks and tea) is generally about 15 LE (3 dollars), while lunch in Al Azhar park at the Lakeside Cafe, with its beautiful view of Cairo, generally comes to between 50 and 75 LE (8 to 14 bucks, standard tourism prices).

Entrance to the sound and light show is about 30 LE for foreigners.

Do I have to visit all the spots on the tour?

Goodness no! Arrange it to your liking! You can do as much or as little as you like. Some people find walking through poor communities, particularly places where infrastructure is crumbling and garbage overflows in the streets to be overstimulating and often depressing, despite the uplifting experience of seeing the innovative ways people are improving their lives. Others only want to visit historic Cairo, others only the Zabaleen. You can call it quits anytime. We apologize, however, that we cannot reimburse you for the tour guide's fee if you have booked one of our team as tour guide, since they will have lost work, and they must eke out a living in informal communities where there are no salaries, no social security, and no safety net and the struggle for survival makes every day count!

How do I get in touch with the Solar CITIES team?

Write to:

Hanna Fathy : hannafathy@rochetmail.com
Mahmoud Dardir: khamasino2006@yahoo.com
Mustafa Hussein: mostafa_planet@yahoo.com

How do I get in touch with YOU:

As Solar CITIES founder, I find myself travelling a lot, like my nomadic Arab and Irish ancestors. Look for me on Facebook to keep updated about my whereabouts, and drop me a line at tculhane@ucla.edu, and perhaps we can arrange to be at the same place at the same time!

How did all this start?

History:

For us the idea of inner-city Eco-Tourism in the slums of developing countries began when UCLA Professor Scott Sherman and I were presenting on behalf of the Los Angeles Eco-Village at the Earth Summit in Johanesburg South Africa in 2002.

The inspired and highly motivated community leaders of the South African townships in Johanesburg turned the conference delegates' prurient desire (one Stephen King suggests we all share in his essay on "rubber necking") to gawk at tragedy and iniquity into an opportunity to share vision for how to help us all emerge from and/or avoid the same fate. They led us on tours of township eco-villages -- parts of the slums where bicycle cooperatives using new micro-credit loan initiatives were building repair hubs and bike lending stations to solve the transportation problems of the urban poor in a green way, places where innovative designs for urban composting toilets were solving the sewage problem and eliminating odor and disease vectors, places where small solar panels and LED lights were giving kids a chance to read at night and women a chance to have safe communal spaces, and places where urban horticulture of appropriate indigenous crops were offsetting the threat of starvation.

At the many Earth Summit centers (for the conference was spread out across the vast city) colorful home-made brochures and maps for these inner-city shantytown tours were in abundance at kiosks or distributed by friendly volunteers with broad smiles who took pains to allay the fears of white guests who might otherwise not have considered a visit to the "black ghettoes". The maps showed the best and safest ways in and out of the townships and at each stop on the map there was a description of what you were likely to see.

There were also mini-van tours provided to the distant "Tlholego Eco-Village" (near the Molokwane Iron-Age Village Conservancy near Rustenberg) were we could contrast rural sustainable development ideas with the urban ones we saw in J-burg.

Scott Sherman and I, who had been working with Maya Quiche development specialist Pedro Cuc on rain-forest village eco-tourism in Macanche, Guatemala (in the Peten near Flores and Tikal) were deeply impressed by the South African's urban initiative.

We had experience in inner-city eco-tourism from our years living and working with the visionary founder of the Los Angeles Eco-Village, Lois Arkin -- in fact many Sundays between 1999 and 2003 I hosted international and national visitors in my Eco-Village home at 112 Bimini Place to demonstrate my "earthquake and terrorism/disaster-proof off-the-grid apartment" where I had cut myself off from all city services except incoming water (but including a cut off from city sewage) installed my own solar electric system and solar hot water system, built my own indoor composting toilet, had two bicycle generators to get through any unusually long strings of cloudy days, and established a rooftop water purification system to recycle grey water. You can hear and read the transcript of a radio report done for NPR (National Public Radio) by Alan Weisman (author of "The World Without Us") here.

Lois Arkin and the Eco-Villages, along with Julia Russel of the Los Angeles Eco-Home, have, for years, also organized city-wide and region-wide tours of the "homes for the future" -- places where ordinary folks have taken it upon themselves to reduce our dependency on fossil and nuclear energy and unsustainable lifestyle practices. During those tours Al Silva and I, who had formed an inner city group called "Solar South Central" in "The 'Hood", also led tours to Al's Solar South Central Studio where we powered a video and audio production studio, used to produce gangsta rap music videos, using gentle sunlight.

When the Christian Science Monitor and when NPR's Alan Weisman and others came on our Solar South Central tour, we showed them how we were converting cars from gas to electricity (using Mike Brown's excellent do-it-yourself guide "Convert-It") , how we were raising chickens, ducks, and even cows in urban backyards, composting all the organic and kithcen waste and taking all cardboard, plastic and metal to the local recycler so no garbage trucks were necessary, and turning the dreadful american lawn in the front into a beautiful and functional place of corn and nopal cactus and climbing cherimoya vines (much to the consternation of the police who must have some deal with the mow-and-blow-and-seed-and-weed-the-turf " crowd because they tried to arrest Al and his mom and all the neighboring Mexican immigrant families for violating zoning laws that stipulate "no agriculture in residential areas"!)

So we had some personal experience in successful eco-ghetto tours. But the idea of creating such tours for the shanty towns of what Mike Davis calls our "Planet of Slums" as a real way of breaking the barriers between the haves and "the other 90%" have-nots, and inspiring change not just for the poor BUT FOR THE PRIVILEGED PEOPLE WHO VISIT THEM didn't really come home to me until Scott Sherman and I were at the Earth Summit.

Just before going to the Earth Summit I had gone with my UCLA Urban Planning cohort and Professor Abel Valenzuela to Brazil to compare favelas next to the eco-city of Curitiba with favelas in Rio de Janiero, and we had been treated to extremely uplifting and well organized eco-tours of the local Brazilian efforts to overcome poverty. The side of favelas that we saw helped us see poor communities as being rich in ideas and potential, confirming what you read in Hernando deSoto's "The Mystery of Capital".

So it was only natural to set up a similar eco-urban tour for my thesis advisor, Professor Randall Crane, when he led the next UCLA Urban Planning field program to Cairo, Egypt.

When Randy brought his 20 graduate students (Masters and Ph.D.) to spend 10 days in Cairo, we put together an itinerary that included stops to the Medieval part of historic Cairo, Darb El Ahmar, to see a presentation of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture's magnifience urban renewal project by the base of Al Azhar Park (once a garbage dump, now Cairo's first Green space in over 100 years) and to Dr. Layla Iskander's Roh El Shabab Informal Recycling School and the Association for the Protection of the Environment in the Zabaleen community.

I asked one question in both places that led to the same answer and ultimately to our Solar CITIES project. I asked both Seif Rashidi, the Urban Planner at the Aga Khan, and Dr. Layal Iskander "why don't we see any solar roofs in Cairo? Wouldn't it benefit the urban poor to use the abundant sunshine that God has blessed us with in this country, rather than relying on the uncertain availability but certain price hikes associated with fossil fuels and state provided electricity?"

They both had the same answer: "Why don't you come and help us bring these things to the communities? Each of us has a passion and an area of expertise, and the only way we move forward is by contributing the piece of the puzzle we care most about and the things we would be most effective in promoting. The people here need everything. These are the poor. That is the nature of poverty. That's why they are called the needy. And all they really need is somebody with the expertise and the will to come and inspire, and help get ideas and resources to the area and work side by side until capacity is built and they can take it on by themselves. If solar energy is your thing, why not come and help us get it going?"

It was a challenge I couldn't resist for it was elegant and simple and doable. It echoed something I read and discussed with my Indonesian biologist friends when they were studying development technologies in Japan written by David Wann in "Bio-Logic: Designing with Nature to Protect the Environment" . David Wann had exhorted us to get off our asses if we were unsatisfied with the way the world looked and design and implement our own solutions. He said something like "if you buy a box a choclate chip cookies and you find them tastleless and uninspiring, you don't stop eating choclate chip cookies, you say, "shoot, I can make my own cookies better than this" and you do." The same logic can be applied to urban design. If you don't like the way things "taste" in the world, what is stopping you from "baking a better cookie"? Why do you accept stuff "out of the box?" (This is a liberal paraphrase by the way; perhaps somebody who has a copy of this out-of-print book can leave the actual quote in a comment!)

Whatever the actual quote was, the idea stuck: If we want to see solar energy have a more present role in our economy , and we find a place where the residents also want to see solar energy, but neither of us have experience in building it ourselves, what is stopping us from rolling up our sleeves and trying?

So my wife and I stayed in Cairo, moved into an apartment in the slums, and started building with the community. And it all started with an inner-city eco-tour.

Today you can go on that same Eco-Tour of Cairo, and meet the same people we did, only this time, for the first time in civilization's long history in the land of the Sun God Ra you can visit homes with solar roofs and talk with people who built them and benefit from them. You can get involved as much or as little as you want in "building a better world" in the land where the first civilization was built, knowing that you'll not only have a great vacation, but that your presence and interest will keep the flame going for people whose biggest problem, according to Freedom Prize Economist Hernando De Soto, is their lack of articulation with the outside world and the global economy.

Urban eco-tourism is a way to end the isolation of the have-nots from the haves, and for both to share their dreams and their answers to our mutual dilemma of surviving on spaceship earth.

Solar CITIES is now preparing a tour itinerary of the inner city for the great team from National Public Radio when they come to Cairo to do their story on Egyptian Youth and the Environment April 3. It is similar to the tour agenda we set up for the environmental field classes for UCLA, American University in Cairo and for guests like film-makers Omar Khodir and James Dean Conklin and Elisa Zazerra. We would now like to open the tour possibility up to the whole universe of people interested in renewable energy sustainable development and poverty reduction.


How do you get on the tour?

The first step is to get familiar with the itinerary by clicking on the following link and loading this .kmz file in Google Earth. In Google Earth hit the "play tour button" and you will see a fly-through of the agenda taking you from the Marriot Hotel in Zamalek to our solar Cities projects in Manshiyat Nasser and Darb Al Ahmar, then, as a side trip possibility, on to Giza to the Abu Nimrus Environmental Science Center and, finally, the Pyramids of Giza for an evening sound and light show.

You can click on each tour stop for additional information in the pop up balloon.

If the tour appeals to you, contact us and we will put you in touch with tour leaders Hanna Fathy and Mahmoud Dardir who can give you options and prices and discuss possibilities.

One thing is for sure -- you'll see a vision of Cairo that very few others have seen -- a vision that boldly connects the history of civilization with its boundless and optimistic future, now taking place in a ghetto near you!

To download the tour click here (March 12, 2008)

(Note the tour will be updated with new locations and photos, so bookmark this and keep checking for updates reflected in date changes).

Solar CITIES in Darb Al Ahmar: Results and Vision

Picture shows the Solar C³ITIES office and home of T.H. and Sybille Culhane with its community-built solar hot water panels, near the Aslan mosque modelled in Google Earth.

INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY IN DARB AL AHMAR

Toward a comprehensive solution set for a healthy environment and economy

In the spring of 2006 a group of 25 Urban Planning graduate students and faculty from Dr. Randall Crane's class at the University of California, Los Angeles visited the AKTC and were given a presentation by Seif Rashidi on the initiatives undertaken in the area. The group was deeply impressed, and one of the UCLA Ph.D. candidates, Taha Rassam Culhane, on fellowship at AUC, decided to focus his thesis on the issue of household hot water service and demand in Darb El Ahmar.

When preliminary research began to indicate that as much as 25% of the community had no formal water heaters (now confirmed by a survey of 230 households conducted by the AKTC survey team) and that those who did have water heaters were often reluctant to use them or repair them and were returning to dangerous and inconvenient stove top heating because of the rising costs of gas and electricity, Taha began to look for ways to bring sustainable renewable energy to the area through local capacity building.

Picture shows the AKTC project area in Google Earth with 230 household heaters plotted on the buildings. Red = electric appliance, Green = Gas appliance, Dark Blue = Butagas stove, Yellow = Babur.

Architects Kareem Ibrahim and Naveen George gave Taha and AKTC carpentry trainer Mustafa Hussein, who is a local resident, an opportunity to experiment with the possibility of building solar hot water systems out of local and recycled materials using local expertise.

Picture is of 23 year old Mustafa Hussein and his hand-made solar hot water systems, one on his family's centuries old roof next to the wall being restored by the Aga Khan foundation at the base of Al Azhar park the other across from the Darb Shuglan complex. Both were placed to be visible by visitors to the park to increase environmental awareness.

With collaboration and support of graduates from the AKTC plumbing trainee program such as Mohamed Diab, Taha and Mustafa constructed the first three of many functional low cost systems on the roofs of three buildings visible from Al Azhar park. One was placed on Mustafa's home by the Aslan gate, and two on renovated buildings -- 72 Darb Al Shuglan, across from the Darb Shuglan complex, and 4 Abu Huryeba, near the Aslan square renovation area.

A recent US AID small infrastructure grant of $25,000 awarded to the local group, which calls itself "Solar C³ITIES" (Connecting Community Catalysts Integrating Technologies for Industrial Ecology Systems) , is now enabling members of the Darb El Ahmar environmental NGO and members of the nearby Zabaleen NGO Roh El Shabab to work together to build dozens of systems in both communities, sharing experience materials and expertise.

(Picture shows Darb El Ahmar (center, with hot water survey markers showing that 25% of the households heat water with the stove (blue)) in relation to the Zabaleen community of Zurayib across the City of the Dead (also with hot water survey markers, showing that 65% of the people heat water with the stove (blue)). The two communities are now working together to build their own solar and biogas fueled hot water systems as part of an urban industrial ecology effort.)

Plastic and recycled materials: local innovations bring down cost

Because the Solar CITIES industrial ecology project is a local initiative, involving craftspeople from the community, and not an exogenous project (Taha and his wife Dr. Sybille Culhane, though foreigners, now live in one of the renovated buildings), there is a keen sense of participatory development innovation and cost consciousness that makes the effort more likely to endure. The key to bringing cost down turned out to be local experimentation in the use of indigenous plastic parts, most of them recycled from the Zabaleen community. Many of the boxes housing the solar heat absorbers are made from pressed recycled plastic bags, the plumbing uses recycled polypropylene pipes, and recycled plastic shampoo barrels are used as pressure regulating cold and hot water storage tanks. These tanks are fitted with plastic Float Valves (Owamas) and durable plastic fittings supplied by Egyptian inventor Magdy Zahran.

(Picture: Local inventor Magdy Zahran, reknowned for his water conservation technologies, regularly visits the Solar C³ITIES project to lend a helping hand and new ideas, an example of how AKTC initiatives inspire widespread participation.)

Local initiatives inspire widespread participation

In addition to the contributions of Magdy Zahran and other engineers from Egypt and abroad, local renewable energy systems businessman and engineer Alaa Watidy from RSD technologies in Madinat Nasr generously supplied the Solar C³ITIES project a state of the art German-designed/Chinese-manufactured vacuum tube solar collector so local plumbers and residents could try out and learn about the latest technology.

Picture: Local master plumber Mohamed Diab and Engineer Alaa Watidy install professional vacuum tube solar collector on building 72; Solar C³ITIES coordinator Mahmoud Dardir, a Darb El Ahmar native, joins the home-made and professional systems together.

With affordable solar hot water systems providing both cold water and hot water rooftop storage for 24 hour availability in an area where water service is frequently cut, new possibilities for integrated technology/environment/economic solutions become conceivable and the solution space is widened.

In February of 2008 at a meeting of the local environmental NGOs and community members at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Darb El Ahmar, a discussion centered on why the rooftop gardening projects were experiencing sustainability challenges and how integrated industrial ecology solutions – merging the domestic hot and cold water project and the urban agriculture project -- could help bring sustainability to the environmental initiatives. During two hours of very fruitful discussion, the community applied the heuristic "don't dwell on the multiple factors that led to failure, and what doesn't work; figure out instead how rooftop gardens can integrate with the real and perceived needs of the stakeholders, and how they might satisfy multiple needs if integrated with a larger ecological system, such as solar hot water systems". This is the "ecological rationality" approach championed by the ABC Research Group -- "rationality that is defined by its fit with reality".

(Photo: Samiya and Sou'ad, members of the Darb Shuglan/Darb El Ahmar local environmental committee, Samiya's children and Solar CITIES coordinator Mahmoud Dardir observe the integrated solar hot water/rooftop gardening system -- a combined initiative between Solar CITIES and the AKTC environmental NGO that provides rooftop stored hot and cold water for domestic household use and urban agriculture at the same time.)

The discussion among local stakeholders revealed that most people cannot invest time or resources heavily in "pie in the sky ideas" that, however well intentioned, don't fit into the daily struggle to make ends meet in a community that must live with uncertainty every day. New or unfamiliar technologies must be streamlined and integrated into the daily practices of the stakeholders and meet several needs simultaneously without adding incommensurate extra burdens.

What was concluded in the multi-stake-holder environmental meeting was that if we were to COMBINE roof top gardening with roof top water storage and "simultaneous-solar-heating-and-sun-shelter" installations (provides cold and hot water all year round; keeps the roof cooler in the summer) and see it all as part of a gradual move toward energy/food/economic independence (combined possibly with roof top biogas production following the Indian ARTI model for utilizing and creating compost with urban waste , with ground-source heat pump and small scale wind energy and photovoltaic technologies for disaster preparedness and insurance against rising energy and food costs), we could generate more ideas and greater acceptance and stakeholder commitment.

Thus the Solar C³ITIES project at the AKTC is not intended specifically to introduce rooftop gardens or solar energy per se. Instead, the project strives to help a community get on its feet and get sustainable "by all means necessary".

Right now, according to the preliminary survey results on hot water demand, because of what are still relatively high investment costs, very few people living in urban poverty in Cairo are going to demand "solar hot water" systems per se (the high price of copper makes a family size system still cost nearly LE2500). People in the community are adept at heating their water using the stove when necessary and have adjusted to the inconvenience and are unwilling to pay more than they are paying now (their own labor is in greater supply than their income, and is discounted on a daily level). While they almost all recognize the long term advantages of SHW, even with the cost lowering innovations pioneered in the project area, most people cannot justify the expense given that gas and electricity are still heavily subsidized in Cairo. So an attempt to introduce unsubsidized solar energy to the slums WILL fail if that is what we say we want to deliver.



But if we are delivering a concept of integrated industrial ecology -- if we are introducing flexible, modular, changeable solution sets to a multiplicity of local concerns -- then we can build confidence in and familiarity with each new innovative idea, and impart this heuristic -- already available at the local level -- to the task of conceiving environmental technology endeavors that can benefit everyone in both the local and the global environment.

Pictures: Using models of the action area created by Nivine Akl, Mohamed Ebaid, Heba Foda, Kareem Ibrahim, Mahmoud Qotb, Mohamed Said, Nadine Samir, Roberto Simeone, and Ibrahim Zakareya, Taha Rassam Culhane mocks up the solar roofs project in Google Earth to share the vision with the world community in 3D.

Presence of Ceramic Tile as Predictor of Hot Water White Goods

OK, I've capitulated: When I discovered that it isn't easy to use Pivot tables in Excel to generate averages (it seems to do counts within the table but little else) I sat down and started working through "SPSS 15.0 Guide to Data Analysis" by Marija J. Norusis, and started bringing all my data from Excel into SPSS. It is actually far easier to manipulate data in SPSS, so that is what I will do from now on.

Getting tables and pictures out of SPSS isn't as easy as getting them out of Excel was with the chartpic add-in, especially on a Mac Book Pro running bootcamp, but for those of you with the same dilemmas here was my work around:

I got an external USB keyboard (a really cool rubber foldable extended numeric keyboard with Arabic letters from a shop in Bab El Louk near AUC for only around 25 LE, or 5 bucks! I can roll it up and carry it in my jacket!), and with this I can use the "alt-print scrn" commands (not found on the MBP keyboard) to screen capture the active window. I put that into the GIMP using "paste as new image", crop, and save out as a GIF file (uses much less memory).



Here are my preliminary attempts to look at Predictors of Hot Water White Goods:Statistics

We start with the whole sample, once again looking at the frequency of different heater types:



Then we look at the frequency of having ceramic tiles in the bathroom:


Ceramic tile presence is used as a proxy for investment in a bathroom. Anecdotal observations and focus group conversations suggested that families are unlikely to invest in a wall mounted electric or gas appliance water heater if they haven't first "finished" the bathroom. Often they prefer to wait until they can afford to finish the walls with ceramic tiles before installing a wall mounted heater and they will continue to use the stove to heat water until they can afford to do this. Thus, ceramic tiles become a complementary good to hot water heaters. My hypothesis here is that ceramic tiles are the sin qua non of hot water white good presence, and can be used as a useful predictor.

Let's see if the data bear this hypothesis out:


This pie chart shows the 251 households (out of 456 cases surveyed in both communities, i.e. 55 % ) that have water heating white goods (electric or gas wall mounted heaters) with respect to whether or not they also have ceramic tiles in the bathroom. As you can see, 75 % of these white good possessing households have ceramic tiles and 25% do not.

This is consistent with observations on the ground because some families do in fact value hot convenient hot water more than a pretty finished bathroom. But they are in the minority. Thus one cannot say that the presence or absence of ceramic tiles is a perfect predictor for hot water heater preference, but it does seem to have some predictive strength.

Now let's look at users of electric heaters only, and then users of gas heaters only.

(BTW: We use the "IF" statement in SPSS (Data, Select Cases) and use "ANY(V10.2TYPEHEATERCODE,1)" to select all electric heater users. If we want gas heater users we use ""ANY(V10.2TYPEHEATERCODE,2)" and if we want to select both we use "ANY(V10.2TYPEHEATERCODE,1,2)" . The nice thing about the "ANY(test, value, value,...)" function is that you can use it to select out, well, ANY cases you like based on their data code value. I put this note in here so that I don't forget when the Sirens of Titan wipe my memory -- Unk)





First, electric.



Doesn't look all that different from the combined case of Electric and Gas, does it? Here 78% of electric heater users have ceramic tiles in their bathrooms.

Now let's look at gas alone:

Here we see something similar. Of the gas users, 79% have ceramic tiles.

Now let's look at all those people who don't have white goods and use either the kitchen stove, a one-eye portable stove, a hamil or a babur:



Here we begin to see some difference, and the possibility of the predictive strength of ceramic tiles as an indicator of hot water system preference. Here only 46.6 per cent of the households who have no white goods have ceramic in their bathrooms.

The complication here is that we are dealing with aggregate data for both the Zabaleen and the Darb El Ahmar communities, and on the ground observation has revealed that in Darb El Ahmar there are many "finished" bathrooms (such as the one in the flat we rent on Abu Hureyba street) that have no tiles. The old type of buildings in Darb El Ahmar, often made of stone and wood, often favors finishing bathrooms with stucco and white wash rather than tiles. In the Zabaleen informal community almost all buildings are cement and brick, and the unfinished walls, with bare brick, are not suitable for hanging heaters on. So we might expect different results if we look at each community separately.

(Methodologically we considered changing the question to "is your bathroom finished or unfinished", but since the poor live in an "incremental housing" situation we were afraid that many people would answer "unfinished" regardless of what was in the bathroom, and that others might answer "finished" meaning "I can't afford to do anything more" even if the bathroom lacked many amenities. For this reason we chose "presence of ceramic tiles" as a proxy).

The Zabaleen:

To run the same analysis on just the Zabaleen cases where people lack white goods, SPSS lets us simply go to "Data, Select, If" and type "ANY(V10.1.2TYPEHEATERCODE,3,4,5,6,7,8)&ANY(V0.1REGIONCODE,1)"


We start with the case of people who have no hot water white goods:



We see that 46.9% of them have no ceramic tiles in their bathrooms while 51. 7 % do.
We will try to explain this finding below.


Here is the table and chart of Zabaleen who DO have white good water heaters:



This begins to get interesting. 100% of the 79 households that had water heating white goods (of those: 79.7% electric, 20.3 % gas) had ceramic tiles in their bathrooms.

In other words you could use presence of a commercial hot water system as a reliable predictor of whether or not the bathroom was "finished" if you were in the Zabaleen community of Zurayib.

The converse is not true however, since 51.7 % of those who had no water heating white goods still had ceramic tiles in their bathrooms. This is consistent, however, with ground observations: Many households I interviewed told me anecdotally that they were "preparing their bathroom" for a water heater, but hadn't chosen one yet, and often hadn't finished putting in the pipes or the toilet and sink. So while most people who have ceramic in their bathrooms say they are "intending" to get a commercial hot water heater, we can't use ceramic tiles as definite proof that they will (in fact, some of the homes that had ceramic tiles and finished bathrooms had used electric heaters or gas heaters previously and then had abandoned them or failed to replace them when they broke because of the rising costs of gas and electricity. These people had returned to using the stove.)

Let's see how Darb El Ahmar compares:

Darb El Ahmar



While certainly the majority (69.2%) of Darb El Ahmar residents who use white goods for water heating have ceramic, one cannot use the presence of a water heater as a high confidence predictor of how water systems, in contrast to the Zabaleen case. As mentioned, this is probably because many homes in Darb El Ahmar "finish" their bathrooms without tiles.



In contrast to the Zabaleen case, of those families who do not use white goods, the majority (61 %) have no ceramic. Again this may be a cultural/structural difference since ceramic tiles are not seen as being necessary for "finishing" a bathroom.

These preliminary frequency statistics do help bolster the argument, however, that there is much more going on than income and the cost of hot water heaters as determinants of hot water system choice.

Unlike the situation in most "developed" countries, where housing stock is usually "finished" before a family moves in, people in developing countries tend to live in an "incremental" housing situation where preferences and choices are guided by the presence or lack of many complentary goods, not just the presence of market substitutes. As Turner is famous for saying "housing is a verb, not a noun."

Cost structure for electricity and gas in Cairo

In our sample the average estimated monthly expenditure on electricity was as follows:

Zabaleen: LE 43.03 (Median = 35)
Darb El Ahmar: LE 39.92 (Median = 35)

Average Estimated monthly electricity bill for those who use electric water heaters:

Zabaleen (n=62) : LE 58.39 (median = 40)
Darb El Ahmar (n=126) LE 46.0 (median = 40)

Average Estimated monthly electricity bill for those who use gas water heaters:

Zabaleen (n = 16): LE 40.81 (median = 30) (difference from 58.39, the average of electric heater users: LE 17.58; median difference = 10)
Darb El Ahmar (n= 46): LE 40.35 (median = 40) (difference from 46.00, the average of electric heater users: LE 5.65, median difference = 0)

Average Estimated monthly electricity bill for those who use the kitchen stove to heat water:

Zabaleen (n = 104): LE 38.64 (Median = 30) (difference from 58.39, the average of electric heater users: LE 19.75)
Darb El Ahmar (n= 46): LE 27.85 (Median = 25) (difference from 46.00, the average of electric heater users: LE 18.15)

Average Estimated monthly electricity bill for those who use a One Eye Portable Stove:

Zabaleen (n = 10): LE 29.7 (Median = 30) (difference from 58.39, the average = 28.69, difference from median = 10)
Darb El Ahmar (n=3): LE 18.33 (Median = 15) (difference from 46, the electric users average, = 27.67, medians difference = 40 - 15 = 25).


Average Estimated monthly electricity bill for those who use a Hamil floor grill to heat water:

Zabaleen (n = 26): LE 32.8 (Median = 32.5) (difference from 58.39, the average = 25.59, difference of medians = 7.5)
Darb El Ahmar (n=1) LE 14 (Median = 14) difference from average = 25.92, difference from median = 21)

Average Estimated monthly electricity bill for those who use a Babur to heat water:

Zabaleen (n = 3): LE 16.7 (Median = 20) (difference from 58.39, the average = 41.69, difference from 40, the median = 20)
Darb El Ahmar (n=8) LE 25.15 (Median = 23.50) difference from 46, the average = 20.85 difference from 40, the median = 16.50)


Though there is no question that heating water with electricity is more expensive per liter than heating with gas, more detailed analysis is needed to determine why electric heater users in the Zabaleen community appear to be (or at least report) spending as much as three times as much on water heating than the gas users in Darb Al Ahmar. It may be that there is greater awareness of the true price differences among the Zabaleen (i.e. that water heating can take up to a third of the electric bill) but it could also be that the Zabaleen, who frequently run home businesses with electricity intensive machinery, have larger family dwellings with more light bulbs and other appliances per building, have generally larger electric bills. Evidence that it might be a family size issue is supplied by the fact that the amount of electricity used by stove heating families in the Zabaleen is also higher than that used by stove heating members of Darb El Ahmar, and the same difference in cost is observed in both cases: A differential of approximately 18 to 20 LE per month.

It is hard to say why those using gas heaters in Darb El Ahmar have such a high electric bill, but perhaps those who can afford white goods like electric hot water heaters and gas hot water heaters are also those who consume more in general.
The differential between the electric heater users in the Zabaleen and those in Darb El Ahmar could reflect that the types of Zabaleen families that can afford to use electric water heaters also consume more electricity; i.e. those that are conservative about electricity use and costs would be those least likely to own electric hot water heaters.



Gas and electricity are heavily subsidized by the Egyptian government. This makes any transition to renewable energy systems particularly problematic. It is estimated that Egypt loses approximately 40 Billion LE (about 7 or 8 billion dollars, depending on how the dollar slides; it's hard to convert to dollars these days!), or roughly 8% of her GDP subsidizing gas and electricity, money that could be invested, as Tunisia is now doing, under the UNEP initiative, in solar energy systems for long term savings and benefits.

The current subsidies on power and fuels make prices roughly five times lower than they would be in the free market. This means that what would normally be a 5 year pay back period on a solar thermal system, for example, will take 25 years to pay back in Cairo. A solar electric system, with a payback period of normally 15 years, will take 75 years in Cairo.

Small wonder, then, that so few people are using renewable energy in Egypt!

Cairo offers a tiered subsidy system that is supposed to benefit the poor. As you can see from the table below, the first 50 kWH each month only cost 5 piastres -- about a penny! The next tier, from 51 to 200 KWh, cost only 9.2 pt, and up to 350 KWh one is only paying 12.5 pt, still roughly 2 and a half cents per KWh.




First, the Tariff Structure for Cairo Electric Services (from the Annual Report 2005/2006):

(Pt = piastres; 100 Pt = 1 LE = 20 cents, 5 pt = 1 cent)

Residential:

kWh monthly: Pt/KwH

1) First 50: 5

2) 51 - 200: 9.2

3) 201 - 350: 12.5

4) 351 - 650: 18

5) 651 - 1000: 25.5

6) More than 1000: 31

Commercial:

1) First 100: 19.8

2) 101 - 250: 28.7

3) 251 - 600: 36.6

4) 601 - 1000: 45.3

5) More than 1000: 47.5

Public lighting: 33.1 pt/KWh


The author and his wife monitored a typical 50 liter Olympic Electric heater for a month, taking two 5 minute showers a day (25 liters per shower) and found an average use of 2 KW per 50 liters. At this rate, over a month, we are consuming 60 KWH. The first 50 cost 50 cents, the next 10 cost roughly 20 cents, thus a month of showering cost 70 cents for a couple.

Figuring that 50 liters a day costs 2 KWH per day, we ask ourselves, what would be the cost to heat 200 liters per day (the equivalent of our solar hot water tank)? 200 liters would consume roughly 8 KWH per day; over the month that would be 240 kWh. That would cost 50 x 5 = 250 Pt + 150 x 9.2 = 1380 Pt + 40 x 12.5 = 500 Pt; So to heat 200 liters per day for a month would cost 2130 Pt or 21 LE 30 piastres. This is equivalent to 4 dollars.

Since it costs us, in materials, roughly 2500 LE to build a solar hot water system, it would take 117 months, or 9.7 years, to pay back the investment!!

With a 10 year payback, it is no wonder that almost nobody in Egypt (and virtually nobody among the urban poor) find it economical to switch to the use of solar hot water systems.

Here is an article describing the issues of subsidies from the Magazine Egypt Oil and Gas. It contains quotes from my mentor professors at the American University in Cairo, Dr. Tarek Selim (Economics) and Dr. Salah El Haggar (Environmental Engineering):

Subsidies in Egypt: An issue too hot to touch or too cold to change?
	Download PDF		Print this article		Email this article
Subsidies have become the keyword to an ongoing controversy in the Egyptian energy sector. Arguments swinging between keeping and lifting oil and gas subsidies have raised concerns about the negative effects of “inefficiency” in implementing the subsidization system; its threats endangering the future of energy reserves and its state of being an economic burden on the government. Egypt Oil & Gas Newspaper examines the different perspectives of this debate Subsidies: The Facts According to the Shura Council’s Financial and Economic Affairs Committee report, the subsidies allocated to petroleum products have increased from nearly LE290 million in 1970 to more than LE40 billion at present. Egypt’s Minister of Petroleum Eng. Sameh Fahmy revealed in an interview in Al-Ahram Newspaper that the bill of subsiding petroleum products costs around LE44 billion annually ($7.4 billion). Meanwhile, the total revenue of exports counts for $10 billion. However, the bill of subsidies has been increasing and the Ministry of Petroleum (MoP) had to request the interference of the People’s Assembly to decide whether to keep the subsidies or cut them down. Fahmy pointed out that subsidies are not just directed to the lower income bracket, some of the wealthy people benefit from subsidies as well. “We need to face this problem clearly regardless its negative effect on the ministry’s image,” Fahmy said. Last May, the Shura Council approved an amendment of LE20 billion in the 2005/2006 budget aimed at subsidizing petroleum products and natural gas. In the session, the Minister of Finance Youssef Boutros Ghali stated “three urgent reasons” behind this additional budgetary allocation. The first reason lies in the dramatic increase in oil prices worldwide. This rise has consequently led to an increase in the price of petroleum products, which the government buys from oil companies operating in Egypt. Thirdly, the local consumption of both petroleum products and natural gas has increased. “The government’s strident efforts to raise growth rates to more than seven percent have resulted in a large increase in the consumption of these products,” Ghali said. The Debate However, the increasing subsidies’ budget draws more economic problems as it is a temporary solution to monetary problems. Ghali said that in Africa, governments “usually bear only 10% of the price of petroleum products while the government in Egypt bears around 75%,” which represents a huge economic burden. For instance, the approved subsidies’ increase will result in an additional deficit of LE5 billion to the state budget. To solve this deficit, the government has to ask for either more loans from local or foreign banks or to modify its current subsidies’ policy. The first solution can be considered as an easy way out in the short term “but in the long run it will be disastrous, since it also means a big rise in public debts.” Thus, many may favor the latter choice, which creates a critical debate; to leave subsidies as they are, to lift them or to have a middle ground. Lift them or leave them? The suggestion to remove subsidies has been supported by different scenarios. Tarek Selim, assistant professor of economics at the American University in Cairo (AUC) said that the removal of subsidies should be implemented gradually and in specific conditions. The amount of subsidies allocated for the oil and gas sector are excessive, which makes prices artificially low. Subsidies encourage under production, as economies of scale cannot be achieved with subsidized prices, clarified Selim. Asked about public reaction to such a decision, he declared that when fuel prices were raised last summer, people complained for a while and then they got used to this increase. The gradual lift of subsidies has also been supported by Paul f. Rea, chairman and managing director of fuels marketing at ExxonMobil Egypt. He told Business Monthly Magazine that the subsidies system can be dismantled only gradually. “The government shouldn’t remove subsidies entirely, but the drive should be in the right direction for the safety of the country,” said Rea, who recommended immediate incremental price increases of a few piasters per liter of fuel in order to fulfill this goal. Rea warned from a possible public intense rage in case of removing all subsidies at once. He referred to countries such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria and the Philippines in which ending petroleum subsidies had been “a disaster.” In an interview with Abdallah Shehata, professor of economics and political science at Cairo University, he tackled this issue from another perspective; the loss of massive amount of subsidized energy utilized in heavy industries. Shehata said that industries which depend on crude energy to produce final products, such as cement, fertilizers, iron and steel enjoy double privileges. They receive oil, natural gas and electricity at low prices, while they sell their final products in international markets at high prices. Shehata added that, “the subsidization policy, as it exists, does not achieve its purposes. It does not increase the competitiveness of locally produced products and it does not give the consumer affordable products.” He recommended the gradual removal of subsidies, while making a reform strategy in the way dealing with heavy industries. Agreeing with the same argument, Salah Hafez, former vice president of Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC) confirmed the necessity to lift energy subsidies allocated for factories, such as cement and fertilizers. In an interview with Al-Masry Al-Yom Newspaper, Hafez recommended to suspend authorization for new similar factories in regard to the limited source of energy and to direct this energy towards more beneficial use especially that factories export their products to international markets and do not sell them in local markets. “In general, I am against the concept of subsidies, except for natural gas used in the transportation sector. I believe this is the only subsidy that should remain in the energy sector in order to promote the concept of natural gas usage in public transportation to minimize both fuel and economic losses,” commented Salah El-Haggar, professor of energy and environment at AUC. El-Haggar highlighted that removing subsidized energy allocated for industries will result in developing an efficient energy system better than the traditional one, and therefore promote the concept of energy conservation. For instance, encouraging taxies, buses and microbus drivers to use natural gas instead of fuel by providing them with subsidized prices will definitely help in decreasing the rate of energy loss and achieving more economic profit. Sharing the same vision of promoting energy conservation through subsidies removal, SUCO former chairman Hamed Mohamed Al-Ahmady told Business Monthly Magazine that citizens “are abusing our resources… If gas stations charged LE 3 per liter rather than LE 1, everybody would cut their consumption – even if it means walking to buy a pack of cigarettes rather than driving.” Energy subsidies create a culture of mass-consumption; citizens use fuel carelessly as long as it is available at cheap prices. Finding middle grounds Representing the intermediate perspective, some have recommended to differentiate between the quantities and prices of subsidized energy directed at lower-income citizens and the one allocated for factories, and to maintain a balance between the needs of both sides. Last December, Fahmy proposed to the Shura Council’s Industrial Production and Energy Committee lobbying the High Constitution Court to reverse its 1997 decision prohibiting multi-pricing of gasoline and natural gas. Fahmy argued that since demand for investment in Egypt has increased, especially in the cement and steel manufacturing sectors, the ministry could afford selling energy at higher prices to factories, while maintaining the subsidized price for the public. Fahmy’s suggestion has not been approved yet; however some experts believe that it will solve the problem of subsidies. Commenting on Fahmy’s suggestion, Selim declared that pricing in general has been a major problem in Egypt’s energy sector. “There is no economic incentive to expand investments and achieve economies of scale because prices are fixed, not market based.” He added that due to this pricing issue, the government is acting as a monopsonist (the only buyer), which is another symbol of inefficiency because being the only buyer of oil means that it is fixing the prices for oil companies to sell their products to the public and expand their activities. Based on the idea of establishing a middle ground, some suggested setting energy prices based on the international ones only for factories, while maintaining subsidized energy for citizens. Yosry Kotb, Board Member of the Administrative Committee of the Engineering Industries Chamber said that international prices should be used only with factories that sell their products in the international markets. However, this suggestion has been criticized by some experts. Nabil Farid Hassanein, head of the Chamber of Engineering Industries pointed out that low prices of energy, personnel and infrastructure are factors to attract more foreign investors, thus selling energy at high prices will decrease the level of both local and foreign investments in Egypt. On the contrary, some foreign investors criticize the system of subsidies, stating that it limits the expansions of investments in Egypt. In an article published in Business Monthly Magazine, Michael Barron, former policy and corporate affairs manager at British Gas (BG) Egypt, said that the subsidies system “distorts the market, is unattractive to investors and provides people with no incentive to buy more fuel-efficient cars or switch to cleaner fuels.” Barron emphasized that BG conducts studies on energy subsidies as an attempt to assist the government in forming a more effective policy. Rea believes that “the government oil sector is going to have difficulties ahead if the oil subsidies continue. The money is going to have to come from somewhere.” However, lifting subsidies is a double edged sword. It can be the solution to a possible energy and economic crisis in the oil and gas sector, yet it can create negative effects if the impacts of such a decision on the market are not studied well. Thinking positive Focusing on the bright positive side, Shehata confirmed that lifting subsidies will strengthen the sense of competition in the market. Most of the factories enjoying subsidized energy are in control of a large share of the local market. For instance, an aluminum company and two iron and steel companies hold around 60% of the market. As for fertilizer factories, three companies control 92% of the market, while in the cement industry, three companies control 70%. This wipes out the competition factor in the Egyptian market. Concepts of energy conservation can be easily achieved when citizens realize the value of fuels when subsidies are removed, which diminish the sense of careless mass-consumption and save energy reserves for future generations, said El-Haggar. Besides, Selim confirmed that energy sustainability can be one of the attained goals in the presence of subsidies allocated only for the natural gas, but this sustainability will never be achieved if subsidies are directed to all energy types. On the other hand, Selim warned of two main social and economic losses that might accompany the implementation of this decision. First, there will be an increase of required expenditures from households; the estimated amount of expenditure needed to break-even these subsidies is almost 100LE per month for every household incorporating four people. This represents an additional economic burden on the government. To tackle this negative consequence of removing subsidies, we need to enforce a minimum wage law. In order to set this law, we have to formalize the informal sector that represents 40-50% of the economy and find out the incentives for this objective. Egypt signed the UN Millennium Development Goals, which sets a minimum wage standard for work contracts, equivalent to 342 LE per month in the case of the Egyptian status. The second loss lies in inflation. Lifting energy subsidies will create from 5-7% additional inflation repression on the economy because energy is input in almost everything in our daily life. By Yomna Bassiouni

Paying for hot water... with your life.

My HP 1315 All-in-one scanner stopped working (some kind of short-circuit giving me an "overcurrent" message on the USB port; caveat emptor, avoid HP scanner/printers like the plague!) but this article from page two in the Wednesday January 23, 2008 edition of "The Egyptian Gazette" is too important to our goal of providing solar hot water to Egypt not to type it all in here by hand (since only the front page is available online).

The story reads as follows:

Heavier on the pocket, lighter on the gas

Mohamed Tharwat
Special to The Gazette
______________


SEVERAL governates are facing problems with gas cylinders. What makes the situation worse is that we are now in the throes of a very cold winter.

The price of a cylinder has risen to LE20 ($3.60) in Luxor, about 430 miles south of Cairo, and el-Qalubiya 12 miles north of Cairo. The cylinders also weigh less than usual, while some cylinders made in China are malfunctioning, which is obviously extremely dangerous.

Natural gas has not been connected to all governorates and most Egyptians rely heavily on gas cylinders for cooking and heating. The official price for a subsidised gas cylinder is LE2.50 (45 cents) from the warehouse but, due to the many intermediate traders, they cost the consumer from LE10 to LE20.

Although natural gas is available in most districts of the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, low-income classes still suffer from the high price of the cylinders and the fact that they sometimes leak, causing terrible accidents, in many cases fatal.

Fathiya Abdel Aal, a nurse, describes the cylinders as time bombs, adding that she's recently bought seven cylinders that have all malfunctioned.

Galal Hamed, a civil servant, syas that a cylider costs more than LE10 and that a number of accidents in his district have claimed the lives of innocent citizens, but officials have done nothing.

Metwalli Ali, an accountant, asked a cylinder warehouse owner why the cylinders were malfunctioning. He told him because they are imported from China and that it is the regulators on the cylinders that malfunction. He also admitted that the quantity of gas has decreased markedly, while the prices have increased.

Mahmoud Abdel Halim, Director for Supply in the coastal city of Alexandria, says that his staff visit the warehouses everyday, in order to check on the safety of the cylinders and measure the quantity of gas.

Samir Youssef, the Governor of Aswan, about 720 miles south of Cairo, has asked the municipalities and NGOs to distribute cylinders, pointing out that the Governorate itself has recently increased the number of cylinders available each day from 24,000 to 27,000. Another problem is that there's always a mad bundle for cylinders when the warehouses open every morning.

Refaat Abdallah, who works for the municipality, accuses the Gas Company of deliberately reducin the quantitites, thereby wasting LE52 million of the monthly State subsidies on the cylinders. He has demanded an investigation into the matter.

Despite the presence of a gas factory in Luxor, a cylinder there costs LE20 amid widespread popular discontent and official apathy.

Salah el-Awamy and Mamdouh Aboul Wafa, members of the People's Committee against Corruption inLuxor, say the crisis is getting worse because much of the gas that it bottled at the factory ends up in the cities of Esna and Armant, without approval from the city officials and local councils.

Back to Grater Cairo, where black market traders in el-Qaliubiya have put up their prices to LE15, despite the availability of cylinders, as natural gas has become accessible in the cities of Shubra el-Kheima and Benha.

Shehata Abu Shoeir, a member of the municipality, blames the dealers for this price rise, as they take their quota of cylinders from the warehousers and sell them on to the public for up to LE15.

Mohamed Mourad, the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Supply and Home Trade, said in press remarks that there was not a crisis, stating that the Directorate had been meeting its quotas for the warehouses.

"But the warehouses refuse to take their whole quotas, claiming that there is a lack of demand, which refutes the existence of a crisis," he argued.

No crisis? Lack of demand? My dissertation refutes the existence of a lack of demand, and refutes the notion that there is no crisis. Let us, for the moment, discount the danger of using the gas cylinders, whereby the unlucky pay for heating with their lives. Let us consider first only price.

When I left Cairo the last time in February, gas cylinder prices in Darb El Ahmar and Manshiyat Nasser were hovering around LE7 and most families were using 2 bottles per month for heating water. A price hike that doubles or triples this price, they told me, puts them in a terrible financial position, since the average teachers salary is 300 LE per month (about 50 dollars -- per month! Imagine). When heating water for bathing costs around 15 LE per month, you are talking about 1/20th of your salary, or roughly a day or two of work, just to pay for water heating. Double that to 30 or 40 LE per month (when the price is at 15 or 20 LE per cylinder, as in Luxor) and you are now spending 1/10 of your salary (now 2 to 4 days) just for heating water.

And 300 LE is considered a GOOD SALARY! Here is another Egyptian Gazzette article that comments on the matter:

The poor grow poorer Mohssen Arishie Staff reporter March 7, 2008 __________________________ Millions of Egyptian families are angry with the Government. Their anger has been stoked by a recent report from the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), which says that families are only poor if their monthly salary does not exceed LE166 (about $30). Poor families protest that the CAPMAS' miserable findings will encourage the Government to stubbornly refuse to augment their wages. What has added to their angry is the fact that human development experts say that families are poor if their monthly salary is no more than LE585 (about $105) per month. In fact, these experts say that, with LE585, the average housewife would struggle to buy what she needs for just one week, let alone a month. School fees are a constant nightmare for these families, while, if one of their members falls sick and has to see a doctor urgently, it's a terrible financial crisis. As far as health services are concerned, places of worship, whether for Muslims or Christians, are very popular with poor people, because mosques and churches often have clinics attached to them, where the medical treatment is very cheap. The sad report from CAPMAS is borne out in reality. For example, an employee who's been working for the Ministry of Education for more than 13 years says that he only earns LE500 per month. The employee, married with three children, adds that his family's economic prospects have crumbled because his wife, a graduate of a technical secondary commercial school, cannot find a job. "We have to survive on LE500 a month," says the employee asking not to be identified. He adds that he and his family are on the verge collapse, given the alarming price rises. "I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say that my mother has to share her pension with me and my brothers." One of his brothers, who is also a civil servant, has to work nights as a security guard in a private company to augment his tiny income. "This traumatises his family, as it means his children only see him once a week," he notes. "We wake up every morning only to discover a new price increase. Our life has become a nightmare. We can only buy our children new clothes once a year from a cheap downtown market.” Egyptians have been hit by successive waves of price rises over recent years, a situation that has triggered a series of labour strikes for higher wages." Now let's turn our attention from the financial crisis surrounding water heating and look at the health risks. In another post I will talk about what our survey has revealed about "perceptions of danger". Here we only want to consider empirical evidence from two questions we posed the families in our sample: 8.1 Have you experienced any dangerous health or safety issues in the past 12 months in this dwelling? 8.2 If Yes, what was the source of this danger? 1. Fire/Burning 2. Infrastructure problem (walls, collapse of roof, stairs) 3. Sewage 4. Other We limited our question to the past year to get a conservative estimate of problems, reasoning that in a sample of our size, if problems were extant they would show up within a year. One could extend this research and get a sense of dangers over the past several years, but we didn't want memory biases conflating or deflating danger. Most people can recall the source of danger within the last 12 months fairly accurately. Broken down now by heater type and danger type we get the following information: